


Building Something Together

by walkingsaladshooter



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Acquaintances to Friends to Lovers, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Author-Typical Food Porn, Ben Solo is smitten, Dry Humping, F/M, Fluff, Happy Ending, Kissing, Mild Sexual Content, Pining, Rey is Resourceful, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22593607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkingsaladshooter/pseuds/walkingsaladshooter
Summary: When Ben confronts his new upstairs neighbor who keeps making all manner of odd noises at all manner of hours, he didn't expect what she's doing up there. He also didn't expect her to be so pretty.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 91
Kudos: 640
Collections: For one is both and both are one in love: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	Building Something Together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fantastic_fanatics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fantastic_fanatics/gifts).



> Based on the following prompt:
> 
> Prompt 1- Apartment complex AU in which one of them is a rowdy neighbor and the other plans on angrily confronting them about it until s/he realizes said neighbor is a lot more attractive than s/he remembered
> 
> I hope this AU happiness brings you a smile!
> 
> A million thanks to crossingwinter for the beta <3 <3 <3

The first time the ruckus starts upstairs, Ben doesn’t think much of it. It sounds a bit like someone’s moving furniture. That makes sense—the apartment above his has been empty for a month. Apparently someone is moving in. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and he doesn’t mind.

The second time is bright and early on Sunday, when Ben is still lying in bed and, as usual, talking himself out of calling his mother. This time it’s less heavy dragging sounds and more hammering, and it goes on for far longer than hanging shelves or pictures or whatever ought to take. Ben does not love mornings, nor the guilt cycle of avoiding calling his mother, nor having his wallowing interrupted by relentless banging. He smushes the pillow around his ears and shoves his face down into the mattress, trying to block out the noise; when it doesn’t work he climbs out of bed, swearing a blue streak, and goes to make coffee.

The third time is at ten o’clock on Monday night, and Ben very nearly tears up the stairs and beats down the offender’s door.

But he doesn’t. The past six months have been an ongoing exercise in  _ anger management _ and  _ trauma processing _ and his therapy bills probably funding the entire construction bill of his psychologist’s new deck. The Ben who would have hammered his fist on a stranger’s door and hollered threats is on the other side of his father’s funeral.

Still. The Ben he is now is still pissed. But he manages to rein it in to pacing his apartment, having a lengthy conversation under his breath with an imaginary person (probably not his mother; maybe his therapist; maybe Poe, who somehow never dropped Ben even when he had every reason to) in which he swears every other word and complains about things like  _ the audacity of some people _ and  _ blatant disrespect for communal living situations _ and  _ a level of selfishness that surpasses all reason or logic. _

By the time he goes to bed a scant five hours before his alarm will go off for work, the sounds have at least died down from more hammering to some strange, sustained, rhythmic sound that pings familiarity in the back of his mind, though he can’t quite place it.

Every single night that week, it continues. Not always quite so late, thank god. Sometimes the asshole upstairs is content to cease their stomping by eight o’clock. But other nights it doesn’t even start until after Ben is in bed. Once he actually wakes up at three in the fucking morning to that same rhythmic sound, and it takes all his tenuous self-control to not storm upstairs.

After a rousing symphony of hammering and dragging and thumping all night on Friday, Ben wakes up late on Saturday, bleary-eyed and bitter. He’s gotten no farther in his morning than starting to brew a pot of coffee when it starts. Again.

His hand clenches around the coffee can.

“It’s been. Less. Than six hours.” It’s surprising he doesn’t break his teeth, gritting them this hard.

He takes five deep breaths so he doesn’t scream. Then he calmly leaves his apartment and climbs the stairs to the second floor.

The apartment above his has a nondescript but colorful blue doormat in front of the door. He stands on it as he knocks (hard, but knocking, not pounding with his fist) three times.

A thud inside. A scuffling sound. A few moments pass, and then the door swings open.

Holy shit.

The most beautiful person Ben has ever seen in his life peers up at him with a furrowed brow. “Yes?”

He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again to speak.

“I live in the unit below you. You’ve been making a lot of noise lately and it’s disrespectful. Cut it the fuck out.”

Well. He’s never been great at impulse control.

Her hazel eyes widen up at him. Her pretty pink lips part.

And then her face hardens. “Wow. You’re really, really rude.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“What—how am I being rude? You’re the one hanging shelves or whatever the fuck at three in the morning.”

She huffs. “Get bent.” And then she slams the door in his face.

Ben stands stock still on her doormat, heart pounding.

It’s probably a bad sign for him that he found her even more breathtakingly pretty when she got angry.

  
  
\-----  
  


These are the things Ben knows about his upstairs neighbor:

  1. She is beautiful.
  2. She is rude.
  3. She is deeply spiteful.



The third point is proved when, after their confrontation, she doesn’t take his request to heart and start relegating her ruckus to daytime hours. Nor does it stay as randomized as it was before. It seems to always concentrate right around eleven at night, now, and more often than not, he hears her doing whatever it is she’s doing directly above his bedroom.

It pisses him off a little. Mostly it makes him curious. If nothing else, he can relate to the spitefulness.

That’s new and welcome, not being more pissed than anything else. Ben latches onto it.

His curiosity grows with each day. (As does, if he’s honest with himself, the amount of time he spends thinking about her eyes, her freckles, the way her hand curled around the doorframe.) So on Tuesday evening, he goes back upstairs and knocks again on her door, three times, not quite as hard as before.

It’s quiet on the other side of the door now, but it takes a little longer for her to open it. She’s already glaring at him. “You know, I almost didn’t answer when I saw you through the peephole,” she says. “But I figured I’d give you the change to apologize.”

“What?” Ben shakes his head. “No, I wanted to ask—what are you doing up here, anyway? With all the noise?”

She squints at him, tilting her head a little. Last time her hair was tied up in a loose bun on top of her head; today it’s down, the top half pulled back from her face. It suits her. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

She rolls her eyes and steps back behind the door. “None of your business,” she says, and then the door is closed.

But not slammed, this time.

  
  
\-----  
  


On Friday, as Ben is arriving home from work and parking in the lot nestled among the trees that surround their complex, he sees his upstairs neighbor struggling to haul—something—through the side door. He parks and turns off his car and watches curiously from a distance for a minute.

It’s a huge plank of wood, easily as long as she is tall and several feet wide. She does manage to drag it in through the door, which is propped open with more planks of the same size. She leans against the doorframe, clearly struggling to catch her breath.

Ben smirks.

When he walks up to her, she looks up at him, hands on her knees, and glowers. “Yes?”

He gestures to the huge slabs of wood. “Want a hand?”

“I’ve got it, thanks.”

“Yeah, I saw you get one inside. I also can see you’re struggling.”

The woman stands up and crosses her arms. Ben doesn’t miss that the palms of her hands are rubbed red and raw from trying to leverage the planks. “Doesn’t mean I can’t manage.”

“We don’t have an elevator, you know.”

“I’m aware.”

“It’ll be hard to get those up the stairs alone.”

“I can do it.”

Ben quirks an eyebrow, hands in his pockets, easy as anything. The way she’s frowning at him, the stubbornness she’s leaning on—it’s familiar. He’s got her number. “I fully believe you can do anything you put your mind to,” he says, surprisingly himself only a little when he sincerely means it. “But are you really going to hurt yourself just to spite me? Trust me, I’m not worth it.”

She stares at him, hard-eyed, for a long moment. Then she sighs and rolls her eyes, uncrossing her arms. “Fine.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. He holds out his hand. “I’m Ben.”

There’s reluctance in her posture when she takes his hand and shakes it, but he also catches a similar not-quite-smile tugging at the corner of her own mouth. “Rey.”

Working together, they get all three slabs of wood in the building, up the stairs, and leaned against the wall outside Rey’s apartment within five minutes. Rey doesn’t say _ Okay, you were right, that was easier than struggling on my own for half an hour, _ but he sees it in the way she bites her lip and drums her fingers on the door frame.

“Want to help me get it all in the apartment?” she asks. “I can give you a glass of water if you want.”

“Ah, water. Your gratitude overflows.”

Rey—he likes her name, likes the way it shapes in his mind—jabs her finger at his chest. “You’re on thin ice. Don’t knock yourself out of my very cautious good graces.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he mutters as she unlocks her door and they start carrying the wood inside.

Rey’s apartment is more like a work studio than a home. There’s—nothing, really. A coat rack near the door with a blue knit bag hanging off it and a pair of boots on the floor. In the bathroom that he can just glance into as they pass it, a shower liner but no proper curtain, a single bar of soap on the edge of the sink and nothing else. And when they make it to the sunken living room just below the kitchen area, the entire floor is covered with canvas dropcloth, littered with tools, and stacked with pieces of wood.

“You live here?” he asks once they’ve brought in the last piece and Rey is filling a jam jar with water from the tap. There’s a square wooden table, stained a warm tone, but no chairs. The only other piece of furniture is a small bookcase, maybe two feet wide and five feet tall, stained the same tone.

“Obviously.” She steps down into the living room and hands him the glass, then takes a deep drink from her own.

Ben takes a drink of water. “Not really obvious.” He waves a hand in the general direction of—well, the entire living room.

Rey’s face is already a little flushed from their efforts, but her cheeks pinken a little more and she glances away. She shrugs.

Ben crosses over to the bookcase and bends down to examine it. He notices a scattering of nail holes that look like they’ve been fixed with some kind of filler.

He turns back to Rey, the pieces all falling together. “You built this?” She nods. He points to the kitchen table. “And that?”

“Yes.” She’s not glancing away now; she tips up her chin and meets his gaze hard, jaw set. “I don’t have much. Building furniture is cheaper than buying it.”

Ben shakes his head. “You don’t have to defend yourself. I think it’s cool.” He glances up towards the ceiling, raising his jam jar for another drink of water. “Even if you insist on doing it in the middle of the night.”

When he glances back over, Rey is biting her lip, one hand resting on her hip. “I’m a little sorry,” she says, sounding deeply reluctant. “Since you’re helping me now. But you really were rude.”

“How is it rude to ask your neighbor not to literally build furniture at midnight?”

“It’s the way you said it.” She’s studying him, now, holding her own jam jar glass up near her chin and turning it in her fingers idly. “I might have been harsher than I needed to, though. I tend to keep my guard up.” She shrugs one shoulder. “Don’t like people much.”

“You and me both.” But I like you, he doesn’t say.

She smiles at his dry tone. “Well. Thanks for helping me carry that stuff up.”

“Right.” Ben downs the rest of his water and hands the glass back to her. “Thanks, Rey. Maybe knock on my door next time you need to haul supplies up here.”

As she follows him to the door, she doesn’t say anything. But once he’s in the hall, he glances back, and she doesn’t quite smile when she says, “I may take you up on that,” just before she closes the door.

  
  
\-----  
  


He doesn’t particularly expect her to ask for his help. On Saturday morning, he hears her start working—that rhythmic noise again, which, now that he knows what she’s doing, he can place as sawing, she’s fucking sawing wood by hand in her living room, she’s nuts and it’s really endearing—but not until about ten o’clock. A perfectly polite time.

He smiles into his coffee cup.

After a while, her work goes silent. Ben lifts weights for a while—it’s the one thing that reliably gets him out of his own head—then reads over another cup of coffee and a sandwich. Then, suddenly, three quick, light knocks on his door.

When he opens the door and sees Rey standing there, he can’t help but smile.

“Want to help?” she asks. She easily could be sheepish about it, but she’s not. She’s direct and her gaze is steady, and Ben finds he admires that.

“More slabs of wood?” he asks, stepping out into the hall with her.

“Not quite.”

She leads him out into the parking lot, where the back hatch of her boxy station wagon is up. The back of the car is full of enormous bags of soil and five-gallon paint buckets.

“What the hell?”

Rey grins. “I’m making a garden on my balcony. Like an oasis. And frankly, this shit is really heavy.”

Despite the fact that he already lifted today and his muscles are a bit fatigued, he nods, crouches, and slings a bag of soil onto his shoulder with an _ oof.  _ “Lead the way.”

Rey grabs a stack of five-gallon paint buckets and scurries ahead of him to open the door and get her apartment opened.

It takes several trips, but they get all the bags of soil and all the buckets hauled up the stairs and out onto her balcony. By the time Ben brings up the last bag, Rey is already crouched on the balcony, a power drill in one hand and a paint bucket turned upside-down in front of her. She squints as she turns on the drill, pushing the bit through the plastic bottom of the bucket to drill a large hole.

“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?” Ben asks, stretching his arms.

She shakes her head. “Drainage holes. These buckets are a hell of a lot cheaper than pots.”

“Huh. Never would’ve thought.”

When she looks up at him, he thinks his heart just might stop. The smile she’s giving him is so… it’s brilliant. It’s sweet and shining and makes her whole face light up in a way he’s never seen on her before. It makes her even more gorgeous, every sweaty, messy-haired, sloppy old-softball-shirt-wearing inch of her. “Thank you for helping me get this up here. I couldn’t wait to get started.”

Ben wants to ask if he can stay and help more. If he can learn to garden from her. If he can help her build whatever she needs to build out here.

But he is, while clearly becoming a lovesick idiot, not stupid. He knows his usefulness has limits, with her. So he just says, “Glad to help. Good luck with the garden.” And that’s that.

He’s turning to head out when Rey says, “Hang on.” Ben turns, hope leaping in his chest, to see Rey standing up and cocking her head at him. “Want to learn how to build some stuff?”

The corner of his mouth twitches like it wants to smile. It’s easy, with her. “Lessons from the master?”

She waves her hand. “I’m no master. I’m just learning, too. But we could learn together, if you want?” Then she shrugs sheepishly. “A lot of stuff would be easier with a second pair of hands, not gonna lie.”

“Well,” Ben says, holding up his hands, “I have plenty of those to go around.”

Rey’s eyes widen and Ben flinches, shoving his hands back in his pockets. Waving his giant paws in the poor girl’s face probably doesn’t come across well. “Anyway. Happy to help. It’s better than sitting around my apartment brooding.”

The startled look leaves Rey. It’s much better when she smiles. “Do you do a lot of brooding?”

“You have no idea.”

She quirks an eyebrow like this is information that interests her, which is ridiculous, because it’s quite possibly the least interesting, most obvious thing about him. But they carry on.

They bring supplies out onto the balcony, planks of wood and nails and her hammer and hand saw. Rey shoves a pencil through her messy bun and hands Ben the hand drill. “Can you do the holes in the buckets? I’m gonna start marking out the wood.”

“Sure.” He frowns. “You don’t have safety glasses?”

She’s already crouching over the pile of wood and squints up at him incredulously. “What are you, a baby?”

“No, I’m an adult who would prefer not to get flying bits of plastic in my eyes.”

“Then close your eyes when you drill.”

“Rey, that’s not any safer.”

She huffs. “I have a first-aid kit. Honestly, Ben.” She’s bent over the wooden planks now, measuring and marking, so she misses when Ben grins as she says his name in that annoyed tone.

Somehow he manages to drill all the drainage holes without losing an eye or busting open a finger, and by the time he’s done, Rey has her planks ready to go. They stack the buckets off to the side and Rey lays out three pieces to start.

“My vision,” she says, “is an oasis. A jungle oasis.”

Ben points upwards to the tree boughs crowding around the balcony. “This isn’t enough for you?”

“There’s never enough green,” she says so emphatically that Ben honest to god gets butterflies in his belly. “So I want to maximize space. If I do three stands of different heights, I can make sort of stair-steps of plants and then store the supplies underneath.”

“That’s clever,” Ben says, and means it.

She grins. “Not bad for a girl who skipped college, eh?” And she shoves two boards into his hands. “Hold those like that. Keep the edges flush.”

Ben holds the boards while Rey nails them together. They’re simple little constructions, like benches but for her plants, but it’s… nice. Making something. Helping.

When all three of the plant stands are finished, Ben doesn’t want to push his luck. So he’s the first to say, “Thanks for showing me. This was… I liked it. Building something.”

Rey nods. “It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?”

He returns the nod, suddenly not sure what to do with his hands. “Thanks. I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Okay.” She walks with him through her apartment to the door, and Ben is stepping into the hall when he musters the courage to turn around and ask the question that’s been simmering in the back of his mind this whole time.

“Rey?” Ben runs his hand through his hair, shaking it out. “Why did you ask me to come up and help?”

“Like I said, it’s easier with help. And you did offer, last time.”

“Right.” He gives her a pale smile. “Makes sense.”

Before he full turns to leave, Rey says, “Also.” He glances back at her. Her arms are folded, her jaw set, but she doesn’t look angry, really. It’s hard to place her expression. “Also,” she repeats, a little softer, and suddenly becomes very interested in a hangnail on her thumb, “it’s lonely, sometimes.”

It’s like something soft and warm, like a blanket, settles over the pang in his heart. He peers at her closely, at the tiny, tiny furrow between her brows that belies the easy slope of her shoulders. “I get that,” Ben says. She looks up, then, and her hazel eyes are bright. Shit, her eyes are so, so pretty. He takes a deep breath and nods. “Have a good night, Rey.” And he finally turns and goes down the stairs.

  
  
\-----  
  
  


Ben doesn’t give himself nice things. He gives himself functional things. Adequate things. (This is something his therapist is working on with him. _ You’re allowed to enjoy things, Ben. You don’t have to punish yourself for how you used to behave. _ Progress is slow.)

But it’s nice, having Rey as a friend. Which is what he thinks she is, after another couple weeks in which, every few days, she knocks on his door and summons him to help her.

The coffee table is simple, but Rey is far more clever than him at seeing how the pieces should fit together. And his hands are more sure than hers driving the nails home. (“Why don’t you use screws?” he asks her, once. “It seems like they’d hold better.” And Rey laughs a low laugh and tells him, “Nails are easier to get back out when I fuck up.” He doesn’t think that’s true, since she has an electric drill, but she’s insistent.) Between the two of them, they make a fair team, and her coffee table is built in record time.

The end tables take longer. She wants to put drawers in them, and Ben is utterly mystified by the necessary hardware and the measurements Rey shows him on the sketches in her college-ruled spiral-bound notebook. “Just show me where to hammer,” he finally tells her, and that makes her laugh a brighter laugh he’s never heard before that goes straight to his heart.

The first time he brings her a plant, the look in her eyes when she opens the door and sees the massive fern in his hands is—well. If Ben wasn’t already smitten with her, he would be at that look.

And that’s the problem, really, with having Rey as a friend.

He wishes it was more.

“I can’t believe you brought me a fern,” she gushes, pure joy in her voice, as she carries it out to the balcony. Ben follows behind her and leans against the frame of the sliding door, watching her place it on one of her plant stands. She’s already got a couple flowers and a bushy basil plant. The fern has friends.

He shrugs one shoulder, hands in his pockets. “It’s no big deal. They have these racks of them outside the grocery store, and I thought of you.”

Rey’s eyes widen. She doesn’t smile. She almost looks… scared? Jesus, that can’t be right, can it? “Thank you,” she says. Then she ducks around his shoulder and into the apartment, calling back, “Want any iced tea?” as she makes a beeline for the kitchen.

“Sure.”

She has chairs now, about a month after moving in. Simple wooden dining chairs she salvaged from the curb, stripped and sanded and repainted. Two match in style, the other two are in totally different styles, but she painted all of them a robin’s-egg blue. They look neat around the square table she built, and Ben sits in one across from her as she brings them their jam-jar glasses of iced tea.

“So what’s next?” Ben asks. The iced tea is too sweet on his tongue, but he almost doesn’t mind. “Once these fucking end tables are done.”

Rey laughs. “I really want to try making a couch.”

“Is that even possible?”

“It is. It would just take a while. Couches are so damn expensive, Ben, and gross when you salvage them.” She whips out her notebook—half-full now with her sketches, calculations, and schematics—and flips to the latest page. She turns it around on the table, showing him. “It’s a little complicated because I’d have to figure out how to do joins. I know I don’t have the right equipment for that. But it’s totally possible.”

There’s this spark she gets in her eyes when she talks about a project, an almost manic gleam. It’s there now. Ben loves it. She gets so focused.

“Well,” he says, “I have no clue how to build a couch. But if you want help, consider these yours.”

He holds up his hands as punctuation, and the words are out of his mouth before he realizes how they might sound. He’s a breath away from opening his mouth to apologize when he sees the focused gleam in Rey’s eyes shift to—something. Something both softer and harder at once.

As she stares at his hands, he sees her slim throat pulse as she swallows.

Ben drops his hands into his lap. Could… could she…

“Fantastic,” she says, and she’s back to bright and clear again. “Let’s build a couch, then.”

And they do. Rey wasn’t lying—it takes a while. Rey doesn’t summon him upstairs every evening—some nights he hears her quietly sawing away on her own—but at least a couple nights a week, he’s crouched in her living room, holding something in place or sanding something down or fitting something together. And then on weekends, since they both have the days off, they clock as many hours as they can stand.

It starts to become something of a ritual. On weekend mornings, Ben gets up, showers, has coffee. For the morning, he does his own thing, but just after lunch, Rey comes knocking on his door without fail. He follows her beaming smile up the stairs, and they spend hours working on the couch.

They wrap up whenever they start to get hungry, and then Rey makes Ben dinner as a thank-you. There are always glasses of water or iced tea, and simple fare like grilled cheese sandwiches or little french bread pizzas cooked in the toaster oven.

She doesn’t really cook, Rey. Ben doesn’t mind, though. A frozen pizza and a glass of iced tea with her, out on her balcony in the summer evening, is the best dinner he could ask for.

“Let’s play a game,” Rey offers one evening, slapping a mosquito away from her bare leg.

“A game.” Ben is watching her, his chest full of the combination of longing and contentedness he’s come to associate with his time with Rey.

“Yes. I learned this when I worked as a summer camp counselor.” Rey scoots her chair—she doesn’t have patio furniture, so they just drag the kitchen chairs out onto the balcony—so she can turn to face him. “We each have to answer three questions. Three specific questions.”

“Ooookay.”

“Listen closely.” She holds up her fingers, counting the questions as she rattles them off. “We have to say something we like about the other person, something the other person doesn’t know about us, and something we think we have in common.”

Ben tracks them, glances up as he feels them click in his memory. “Okay. Solid. Who goes first?”

“Rock-paper-scissors for it?”

He throws a rock to her scissors, and she demands best out of three; then she throws scissors to his paper twice in a row and grins her broad, dazzling grin. “Okay, me first.”

“Hit me, Johnson.”

Rey leans back, glancing upwards and folding her hands behind her head. Her garden is slowly but surely growing, and the buckets of coneflower (“Good for the bees,” she’d told him) and the lettuce she’s trying to regrow from the end of a bunch make the perfect backdrop. “I like that you bring me plants,” she says. “It’s thoughtful.”

Ben glances at the trailing red flowers and the second fern he’s brought over since his first offering. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s nice.” She bites her lower lip for a moment, brow furrowed in thought. “Something you don’t know about me is that I’ve never broken a bone. Which is shocking, all things considered.” Ben laughs, just a low chuckle, but she smiles in response. “And I think something we have in common is that we’re both strong.” She curls her arm in a goofy imitation of a bodybuilder. “I’m wiry. Stronger than I look.”

Ben smirks. “That’s true. It was still a bad idea to try to drag planks of wood the size of your entire body up the stairs.”

“Are you going to give me a hard time about that forever?”

“Probably,” Ben says, lifting his iced tea for a sip and trying not to choke when his heart does a funny twist at the word _ forever.  _ “What were those for, anyway? I haven’t seen you use them. Unless you cut them down.”

Rey shakes her head. “No, they’re just stored in the bedroom until I’m ready for them. I wanted to snag them while they were on sale.” She extends one long leg, poking his knee with her bare foot. “Now you. C’mon. You’ve got to answer the questions.”

“All right.” Ben swallows, scrambling for a compliment that won’t be too revealing. “I like how passionate you are,” he settles on. He lifts one hand to gesture at the balcony around them. “You’ve completely dived into all this and given it everything. That’s admirable.”

Rey nods and takes a long drink of her tea. “Cool. Thanks.”

“And—um. Something you don’t know about me.” Ben scratches the back of his neck. “I’ve lived in five different countries.”

_ “What?”  _ Rey’s face lights up. “No way. You’re kidding!”

“Not at all. My mother was a diplomat most of my life. We moved around a lot.”

“Where have you lived?” Rey leans forward, elbows on her knees and chin in her hands. It’s really, really cute, and Ben tightens his fingers around his glass.

“Well, here,” he says. “Also Germany, Venezuela, Slovakia, and South Africa.”

“Get outta town.”

He smirks. “Been there, done that.”

The laugh he gets in response makes him feel light. “Okay, okay. One more, Ben.”

He licks his lips, thinking. The sugar from the tea is heavy on the tip of his tongue. He should pick something light. They both like grilled cheese, or now they both know how to build a coffee table. But because he is himself, he says, “I think we’re both a little less lonely now.”

And if there’s a god, they must have some measure of mercy, because Rey gives Ben this small, gentle smile that’s so genuine it hurts. He can’t help but smile back.

The couch takes almost three weeks to make and ends up involving more than simple cutting and hammering. There’s elastic webbing to staple onto the frame, cushions to sew from bargain-bin fabric, foam to compress and shove into said cushions and fluff up properly once it expands. And on weekend evenings, once they wrap up, they have dinner together on Rey’s balcony (which is becoming increasingly dense with greenery and flowers, thanks to both Rey’s efforts and Ben’s occasional giftings) and talk and play their three questions game.

Ben learns that Rey knows how to rotate her own tires and pop a dislocated shoulder back in its socket, that she loves classic Hollywood movies and can do a damn decent transatlantic accent, and that she grew up in foster care and is scared of needles.

He tells Rey that he doesn’t like chocolate and that he played the cello when he was a kid, that he can say the alphabet backwards in under four seconds, that he doesn’t call his mother enough and that he goes to therapy.

“I like that you’re honest,” Rey tells him one night. “Even though you’re rude about it sometimes. It’s nice, knowing that what you see is what you get.”

Ben’s bluntness has gotten him in trouble more times than he can count. Hell, it got him in trouble with Rey when they met. So it makes him feel warm and safe to hear her say she likes it. “I like,” he tells her in return, “that you gave me another chance.” He holds her gaze even when it starts to get uncomfortable. “Not many people have.”

Her answering smile is that same small, gentle one he’s growing to love.

She also likes his mechanical skill, she tells him, and his openness to learning, and his dry sense of humor.

He tells her he likes her grilled cheese sandwich skills, her taste in fabric for her couch cushions, her laugh. He’s trying very hard not to let too much show. Because, for all his honesty, he isn’t sure yet if Rey feels the same way he does, and the last thing he wants to do is scare her off. So the most daring he gets is complimenting her laugh.

The things they have in common include:

  1. A distaste for mosquitoes (via Rey, and a cop-out answer, which he doesn’t hesitate to tell her)
  2. A fondness for summer but dislike for sweating (via Ben, which Rey acknowledged was a fair distinction)
  3. Stubbornness (Rey)
  4. Bandaged fingers from carpentry mishaps (Ben)
  5. A love of fireflies (Rey)
  6. Parental issues (Ben)
  7. Bad tempers (Rey)
  8. A genuine need for therapy (Ben)



After he tells her that last one, he freezes, watching as Rey’s small, gentle smile changes into a blank mask. She’s looking too pointedly out into the boughs of the trees, turning her glass of water around and around in her fingers.

Ben doesn’t apologize, though. Because he knows it’s true. The things she’s started to let slip—hints about her shitty childhood, something vague she said while hammering that implied she isn’t actually sure if her parents are even alive or not, but another time she mentioned remembering the backseat of her dad’s car so distinctly—it’s clear something is going on there.

So he’s not sorry he said it because it’s true. But he is a little worried that he said it. Tonight is the night they finally finished the couch, and this particular round of balcony-sitting-til-nightfall began as a celebration of the project’s completion. He’s rather afraid now that, with that done and this blunt thing said, she’s going to ask him to leave and never have him come back.

But that isn’t what happens. Instead Rey takes a slow, heavy breath, then says, “You’re not wrong,” and takes a long sip of her water.

“It’s not a bad thing,” Ben says in a low voice.

Rey laughs, but not the bright laugh he loves. It’s a dry, humorless thing. “I guess I’m a little bit hard to love. All this baggage.” She finally looks back at him again. “You want to know what really happened?” He nods, just barely. Rey nods back, holding his gaze. “They left me,” she says. “When I was five. Left me at a mechanic’s shop after getting an oil change and just never came back.”

There aren’t words for the anger that slices through Ben’s veins. It’s cold and hot at the same time, burning through him and making everything feel very, very clear.

“Fuck them, then.” Rey’s eyes widen; he presses on. “I mean it, Rey. You think that had anything to do with you? It had to do with them. You’re not hard to love. And you were _ a little kid.”  _ He’s breathing hard, and he has to turn away from her and take a drink of water because he doesn’t want to actually lose his temper. “No. Fuck that, and fuck them.”

Rey doesn’t say anything for a while. Ben’s gaze burns into the boughs of the trees, watching as the fireflies start to wink into view as dusk falls deeper. Eventually the pressure of her silence is too heavy on his chest, and he turns back to her again.

He wasn’t expecting this look on her face. Her eyes so wide, her mouth so soft, the tears brimming and something almost like a sad smile. “Do you see through everyone this clearly?” she asks quietly.

“Mostly just you,” he answers.

The corners of Rey’s mouth curl into the ghost of a smile. She reaches out between their chairs, holding out her hand. Heart in his throat, Ben extends his own hand and lets her slide her palm against his, then laces his fingers alongside hers. She’s not a small woman, but his hand nearly swallows hers up. It feels good. It feels right.

They both look back out into the night, holding hands, and count the fireflies as they appear.

  
  
\-----  
  


Rey’s apartment is coming together beautifully. The couch fits well with the coffee table and end tables they made. The shelves along the opposite wall hold her collection of battered paperbacks and VHS tapes, as well as the tiny analog television set with the built-in VCR player that Ben genuinely cannot believe still works. (“It whines and sometimes smells bad when I run it,” Rey admits, “but it’s not going anywhere until it completely shits the bed.”) They built more plant stands for both her outdoor and now indoor plants, as she’s taken heartily to propagating new starts from the spider plant Ben once gifted her. Rey finds a gorgeous old Persian rug at a flea market, and when she sews some sheer white curtain panels for the sliding glass doors, it all brings the living room together well.

Even in the bedroom, her bed may still just be a mattress on the floor, but they’ve built an open wardrobe and a proper table dedicated to her sewing instead of just using the kitchen table and a little bedside stand.

“It’s looking good up here,” Ben tells her the night they finish the wardrobe. “You’re not gonna need my help much anymore.” He swallows, then says, with a rapid heartbeat, “Maybe we can still do these Sunday night hangouts, though.”

“Of course.” Rey smiles at him, her eyes so warm and lingering just a little too long on his. It does nothing to slow his heart. “But there’s—” And then she does glance away, reaching up to scratch the side of her face. “There’s one more project.”

“Are you sure? You seem set.”

She nods and finds his gaze again, and there’s a kind of intensity in her eyes he hasn’t seen in a while. “I’d rather not sleep on the floor the rest of my life.” And Ben is pretty sure his heart stops entirely when she asks, “Want to help me build my bed?”

There’s something there, in her words. A kind of challenge, he thinks.

Never letting his gaze waver from hers, he says, “Sure.”

When they start this last project, Ben sees the huge planks the size of Rey again for the first time since the day he helped her carry them up the stairs. They’re for her bed.

Especially after building that damned couch, a bed frame really doesn’t seem that complicated. Still, Rey knocks on his door almost every evening, greeting him with her small smile and “You up for a little work?” He always is, because he’s realizing he can’t say no to Rey, and because he wants to help her build her bed, because he wants—

So he spends his evenings hand-sawing lumber on her balcony. They do all the sawing and sanding on the balcony, now, to keep the apartment clean. It’s good work, kneeling on Rey’s deck next to her, the string lights she criss-crossed over the balcony glowing above them, triple-checking her marks before sawing on the lines she’s drawn while she works on marking the next piece, the tip of her tongue sticking out between her teeth as she concentrates.

There’s not a goddamned thing else he’d rather be doing.

They have all the pieces cut, sanded, all the pocket holes drilled, and everything ready to build by Thursday evening.

After they haul all the pieces back into Rey’s bedroom, she looks up at him from where she’s crouched beside the pile of lumber. “Come over tomorrow night?” she asks. “We can start the build.”

It’s there again in her eyes: an intensity coupled with a softness, a challenge coupled with a hesitation.

“Of course,” he tells her, and means it far more than those two words could ever express.

When he leaves for the night, Rey grabs his elbow as he’s stepping into the hall. Heat rushes up Ben’s arm and flushes the back of his neck. He turns to her quickly, hoping his hair is covering his ears enough to hide the blush.

Rey is looking at him in the strangest way. Almost—almost confused. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

“Thank you.” She licks her lips and furrows her brow. Ben forces himself not to stare at her mouth. “For all your help. Really. It means a lot to me.”

And Ben—is possibly a little nuts, or very dumb, or maybe just has too much of his father’s heart. Because he reaches out and brushes his fingers under her chin, just barely lifting her face as he smiles at her. “Nothing else I’d rather be doing,” he says, watching her eyes widen.

But the last thing he wants to do is push his luck. So with that, he turns and goes back downstairs.

He’s all the way to the bottom by the time he realizes he hasn’t heard Rey close her door yet.

When he gets home from work on Friday, Ben takes a shower. This is a departure from his routine, and he would lie to himself that it’s just because it’s a humid summer evening, but he knows that isn’t true. He’s never been very good at lying to himself.

He swipes on deodorant, tugs on a t-shirt that he thinks particularly flatters his chest, and heads upstairs to knock on Rey’s door.

She’s all smiles when she lets him in. “Hey! Come on, I’ve got everything set up.” She flashes a grin at him over her shoulder as she leads the way to her bedroom, and Ben thinks very deliberately about changing his car oil and calling his mother and taxes to ward off the semi his dick threatens him with. Rey grinning at him over her shoulder, leading him to her bedroom—yeah. Yeah.

Taxes. Mom’s disappointment. Get it together, Solo.

“I’m hoping to get the base done tonight,” Rey says. “Then legs tomorrow. Headboard’s last.” She twists her pretty mouth, hands on her hips, and stares at the pile of lumber on her bedroom floor. “Is it way too ambitious to want to finish this by Sunday?”

“Possibly. It seems pretty straightforward from your drawings, though.” Ben crouches down to grab the hammer. “I’m willing to put in some late nights if you are.”

He keeps his tone neutral, but he doesn’t think he imagines the small intake of breath that’s her response. It makes something like hope bloom in his heart.

“I’m game. Let’s go.”

It really doesn’t take as long as Ben thought it might. Whether that’s because they’ve gotten a bit better at this whole thing, or if it’s because Rey chose a fairly simple design, he isn’t sure. But the base of the bed is essentially a big rectangular frame with slats. They do take their time, though, making sure everything is strong and sound. Rey finally listened to his suggestions to use screws, so Ben screws metal brackets into the inner corners of the base, doubling down on the sturdiness of the build. There’s also a combination of screws and wood glue in some spots, making sure the frame will hold.

They don’t talk much beyond “Hold this while I drill” and “Pass me the level?” Ben thinks about the sorts of things this bed might support, and when he glances up at Rey, she’s biting her lip and her cheeks are just a little too pink as she drills a screw home in one of the slats.

He really thinks he’s not alone in this.

“Shit,” Rey mutters when the base is fully assembled. “We could probably finish this tonight, if we wanted.”

Anxiety seizes Ben’s chest. No—it feels too soon. The end of their last project, and the chance of— “Let’s give ourselves a break, then,” is what he actually says. “We can finish tomorrow.”

Rey nods, still staring down at the frame with a furrowed brow. “Tomorrow. Sounds good.”

“Hey.” Ben nudges her elbow, and her head shoots up to look at him. “How about I cook us dinner tomorrow night? Big celebration. A thank you for all the grilled cheeses.”

“No.” Rey squints and pokes a finger in his direction. “I feed you as a thank you for your help. Don’t turn it around on me now.”

“Rey.” He’s clearly losing his mind, or finding his resolve, or something, because he grabs her hand and pushes it down, and his fingers linger on the back of her hand a little longer than they should before he pulls his hand back again. “I want to make you dinner. Let me.”

She takes a deep breath, and Ben will not look at her chest as it rises, he will not. “Fine,” she says, almost petulantly. But there’s a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “But I have taquitos for tonight.”

“Excellent.”

When they’re set up on the balcony, the string lights glowing overhead and plates of taquitos on their laps, Rey says, “The questions game is getting harder. I feel like there are fewer things you don’t know about me.”

“I’m sure you can think of something.”

She hums in thought, stuffing an entire taquito into her mouth. God help him, Ben finds it charming. “Okay. One thing I like about you is your eyes. You pretend not to show your emotions sometimes, but your eyes are so expressive. It’s all right there. I like that.” Ben opens his mouth to say something because holy shit did Rey just say she likes his eyes, but she plows onward. “One thing you don’t know about me is that I ran away from my foster home when I was fifteen and train-hopped for four months before they caught me.”

Ben almost chokes on his sip of iced tea. “Are you serious?”

She grins this wicked grin that goes straight to his heart. “A hundred percent. It was a mess. Train-hopping always is. But I did it, and I made it.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yep.” She shoves another taquito in her mouth, chews, and peers up at the trees like they hold answers for her. “Something I think we have in common,” she says after she swallows, “is curiosity. Maybe it comes out in different ways. But I think we both have that.”

Ben wouldn’t call himself curious, exactly. But he does like knowing how things work. Has liked learning how to build things from Rey. Wants to know how Rey herself works, where she came from. So maybe he’s curious after all. “I guess so,” he says, and Rey gives him that small smile.

“Your turn,” she says, polishing off her last taquito.

“Well, one thing I like about you is how brave you are.” He shakes his head. “Train-hopping. Jesus. I could never.”

Rey snorts. “Oh, I know. You use hair product way too often to ever survive on the road. Tracks. Whatever.”

“I don’t use that much hair product.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize your hair smells like oakmoss and sandalwood _ naturally.” _

Her dry humor, coupled with the fact that she’s apparently noticed how he smells, brings Ben to a point of such sudden and perfect clarity that the sounds of the evening, the feeling of sweat on the back of his neck, the sight of fireflies beginning to glow out in the trees, all feel like they’re being sealed down in his mind, wrapped up and perfectly packaged as a memory he will never lose. However much he’s played it down or held it back, Rey is everything. He wants to know everything about her and wants to love every inch of it. And he wants her to know everything about him.

So after a silence that stretches too long, he quietly says, “One thing you don’t know about me is that my dad died earlier this year.”

He’s still watching the fireflies when he says it, so he doesn’t see what face she makes. But he hears the gentleness in her voice when she says, “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” His voice has gone low and rough. He clears his throat and says, “One thing we have in common is that we both want to make things better.” And he finally looks at her, his heart leaping at the soft light in her eyes. “Though I’ll admit that hasn’t always been true for me.”

“But it is now,” she says, leaning her head in her hand. “And that’s what counts.”

Ben nods. “I guess it does.”

They don’t linger much longer after that. Rey starts yawning, and Ben can feel the weariness of a full day—which included building most of a bed and a whole host of emotions—settling over him. They part ways at Rey’s door with a quiet good-night, and when Ben gets back into his own apartment, he stands in the living room, hands in his pockets, and thinks for a while. About building things. About making things better.

It’s a little late, but he pulls out his phone and dials his mother’s number. She never really sleeps anyway. And when her voice sounds on the other end, Ben blinks hard and says, “Hey, Mom.”

  
  
\-----  
  


Saturday is bright and hot and clear, and Ben leaves early for the grocery store. He isn’t sure what he wants to make for Rey, but he wants it to be good. They’re finishing the bed tonight, and he’s making them dinner, and it feels—significant. Important. Even if nothing happens, he wants her to remember tonight as much as he will.

He wanders the store for a little while until he stops in the bakery section and stares down at a dark, grainy loaf of bread. He has an idea. Rey will either think it’s weird and stupid, or she’ll love it.

Ben really does have too much of his father’s heart in him, he decides, because he picks up the bread and chooses to gamble on love.

Once he’s back home and everything is put away in the fridge, he finds himself restless. He doesn’t know when Rey’s going to be ready to work, but god help him, he can’t think about anything else.

So he lifts some weights, gets himself out of his head. Then after, in the shower, he turns everything over in his mind until he brings himself back to center.

Whatever else happens, Rey is his friend. And all the good things she’s brought into his life aren’t going anywhere, regardless of how they leave things.

But he thinks about that small, gentle smile. About the way she looks at him in quiet moments, or the way her cheeks flush and her breath hitches in those fleeting moments when he says something that could be turned a certain way.

Ben won’t assume anything. But he doesn’t think he needs to be nervous.

He’s reading when Rey knocks on his door, but he’s so quick into the kitchen and to the door that he hardly makes her wait before he’s ready with the paper bag of groceries.

Okay, maybe he doesn’t need to be nervous, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t embarrassingly eager.

“Ready?” Rey asks, beaming.

“As ever,” he answers, flashing her a smile in return. It makes something so soft and pretty pass over her eyes that if Ben wasn’t already over the moon for her, he would be now.

“Good. Want help with that?”

“I thought all I’m good for is carrying the heavy things up the stairs.”

Rey laughs, turning and heading upstairs. “Don’t even joke, Ben.”

Up in her apartment, he slides the bag into the fridge. Rey’s already back in her room, and Ben follows the sound of her muttering. He stops to lean against the doorframe, arms crossed and smiling wryly, as he watches her fussing over her makeshift toolbox (which is a plastic dollar-store tote box filled with her tools and various plastic zip-top bags of nails and screws). “Everything okay there?”

She looks up at him with something shockingly close to a pout. “I can’t find the pocket hole screws.”

“They’re in the kitchen.”

Rey frowns. “Why the hell are they in the kitchen?”

Ben shrugs. “Don’t ask me. It’s your kitchen. I just saw them there when I was putting away the groceries.”

She lets out this enormous sigh and rolls her eyes. “Okay, one second.” She squeezes past him in the doorway—her shoulder brushes his arm, and his heart leaps—and then moments later she’s back with the screws. “Okay. Ready to start?”

Ben nods, and they get to work.

There really isn’t that much left to do, all things considered. They attach the side rails to the base, then the footboard. Again, they take their time to make everything secure, but it’s still fairly simple.

Ben furrows his brow, turning the main piece of the footboard in his hands as he gets ready to place it for Rey to drill. “Did you cut this down?”

“Um, yeah. This morning.”

“Why?”

She definitely blushes, though she turns her head so her hair falls across her cheek and hides it. “I decided I didn’t want it higher than the mattress after all. I think I’d feel too boxed-in.”

“Fair enough. Is this flush?”

She leans in to inspect the placement of the wood. “Yeah. Hold it steady.”

The headboard takes a little longer—it has its own framed design, and they have to assemble that before they attach it to the base and side rails—but all told, it only takes a few hours to finish the whole thing. Then Ben helps Rey haul her mattress up onto the frame, and they stand there, side by side, staring down at it.

“Wow,” Rey says. Her voice is soft.

“We built a bed,” Ben says.

“Yeah.”

He swallows. “Don’t sound so amazed. The couch was way harder.”

She glares up at him, but it’s a playful glare. “Shh. I’m proud of us.” Then she turns and leaps onto the bed, landing on the mattress with a squeal and a bounce. A startled laugh escapes Ben as Rey rolls back and forth. “It holds!” she cries. “Oh my god, a real bed. Goodbye dust bunnies.”

Ben can’t hold back his grin now. He holds out a hand to where Rey is still happily wiggling on her sheets. (Does he want to crawl on top of her and make her wiggle for other reasons? Absolutely. But his mother did her best to raise him to be a gentleman, and god knows that went out the window long ago, but at least in this he knows how to be decent.) “Come on, you nerd. I owe you dinner.”

She’s grinning back when she takes his hand and he hauls her up to her feet.

In the kitchen, Rey hoists herself up to sit on the counter on the far side of the sink while Ben unpacks his grocery bag onto the main stretch of the counter. Her eyes grow wider with each additional ingredient he lays out. “Okay,” she says, “what the hell are you making with ricotta, salami, and hummus?”

“Don’t cherry-pick things to make it sound weird,” he mumbles. Hopefully this isn’t stupid. He tosses her the loaf of bread. “I’m making toast.”

“Toast.”

“Yes, toast. Would you be willing to do the actual toasting? I can prep the toppings.”

“Ah, I see.” She leans across the sink to peer more closely at the spread. “Can’t say I’ve ever had fancy toast for dinner before. Peanut butter toast, sure. What are you putting on these?”

“Three savories and a dessert one.” He starts cutting open the avocado as he talks. “Hummus with spinach, tomatoes, olives, and feta. Then the salami goes with the whole-grain mustard and the cucumbers. This”—he waves one clean half of the avocado in her general direction—”gets smashed and topped with red pepper flakes, smoked salmon, and chives. Then the ricotta gets raspberries, honey, and cinnamon.”

Rey is very quiet, watching his hands as he starts slicing the cucumber. He glances up at her, brow furrowed, through the hair falling across his forehead. “Rey? I can toast the bread if you want.”

“No. It’s fine.” She slides down off the counter and turns, unwrapping the bread and plugging in her toaster.

Ben frowns. The lines of her shoulders have gone hard. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. Is it something I did? I can—”

“You’re making…” She turns around, waving her hands at the cutting board. “Smoked salmon. Ricotta. It’s so—so nice. All I’ve ever made you is stupid grilled cheese.”

“Hey.” Ben steps closer to her. Just a small step; the kitchen is small, he doesn’t want to crowd her, but it’s almost involuntary. She blinks up at him. “I love grilled cheese.” Rey bites her lip. Her eyes are still sad. “I mean it, Rey. I fucking love your grilled cheese. This is just…” He turns back to the cutting board, and he hears Rey let out a breath. “This is me trying to treat you. I want to do something nice for you. Let me do something nice for you.”

“Okay,” she says. Her voice is small, but when he peeks back over as she starts to toast the bread, there’s a small smile on her face.

He makes one of each type for both of them, and when everything is ready, they carry their plates and jam-jar glasses of water out onto the balcony. It’s the golden hour, now, and they settle into their usual chairs, surrounded by Rey’s garden oasis. Her pots of coneflower and red poppies and pansies give a riot of color and scent, alongside her collection of fluffy ferns, her herb boxes of basil and mint and chives, the calatheas and the phlox. It’s still too bright to turn on the string lights overhead, but her balcony is magical. It’s Ben’s favorite place in the world.

Rey holds out her water glass. “Cheers,” she says. “To finishing our builds.”

Ben clinks his glass against hers, meeting her gaze. “To finishing our builds.”

They eat their toasts (Rey loves them all, which isn’t surprising because Rey is easy to please when it comes to food, but she especially loves the avocado and salmon, of which Ben makes mental note), and Ben feels centered and at peace in a way he doesn’t often. He feels calm and sure. So when Rey sets her plate down and says, “Questions game time,” he’s ready.

“You first,” he tells her, as is their custom.

She’s looking at him with a warmth in her eyes that can’t be mistaken, he thinks. It makes his blood run warmer, too. “Something I like about you,” she says, “is that you don’t make me feel stupid. Or small. Or worthless.” She blinks a few times, too deliberately. “Too many people have made me feel like that. You never, ever have. And you have no idea how much that means to me.”

Ben wants to get up and go over and hug her. Tight. But it’s still her turn. So he just holds out his hand. She takes it, and he squeezes, and she smiles the gentle smile that’s just for him.

“Something you don’t know about me,” she says, more slowly. “I lied about the reason why I changed the footboard on my bed.”

Ben furrows his brow. “Then why did—”

“And something I think we have in common,” she rushes on, “is that we’re both a little sad we’ve finished all my building projects.”

There’s something so sweet and vulnerable in her face when she says the last part that Ben is willing to let the second thing go. “You’re not wrong,” he says softly, and her thumb brushes across the back of his hand. It sends a sparking under his skin that makes his breath catch in his throat.

“Your turn,” Rey says quietly.

Ben swallows with a dry mouth. She’s so beautiful in the golden evening light, her hand in his, her eyes shining at him. “Something I like about you,” he says, “is how beautiful you are.” Her chest rises with a sudden deep breath, and her cheeks flush. Ben keeps going. “Always. Everything about you. You’re gorgeous, Rey.”

Her hand tightens around his. She’s waiting for his second answer.

“Something you don’t know about me,” he says. He’s leaning closer, his voice warm and low. He thought it earlier; he’s going to say it now. “This balcony is my favorite place in the world. Especially with you.”

Rey doesn’t say anything. But he sees her lick her lips, feels her pulse against his palm. Her lips part softly and she’s—gazing at him, like she can’t look away. He knows the feeling.

“And something I think we have in common.” His chest is expanding, filling with fluttering, with anticipation, with the weight of the moment. “I think both of us want me to kiss you right now.”

Her eyes darken. He sees the second she makes her decision. Then she’s pulling his hand to pull herself up to standing, and he stands to meet her. She comes into his arms like it’s natural, like breathing, and then her hands are cradling his face as he pulls her close to him and bends his head and kisses her.

Rey is so soft under his lips, under his hands; she’s a wiry, lean-muscled creature, but right now she’s all softness and warmth. She tastes like raspberries and smells like coconut shampoo, and the way she kisses him back and smiles against his mouth makes his heart leap and something hot and tight coil low in his belly.

When she leans back after a minute, Ben can’t stop staring at her mouth as she tells him, “The real reason I wanted to cut down the footboard was in case you ended up in my bed. You’re too tall.”

Ben hisses in a sharp breath, fingers tightening on her hips. He leans his forehead against hers. “You’ve thought about that?”

“So much.” She kisses him again, lingering and slow, and it goes straight to Ben’s head. “You and those hands,” she laughs.

“You like my hands?”

“Ben.” Rey trails her fingertips along his jawline, rests them on his lips, and Ben presses tiny kisses against them, every inch of him sparking and yearning. “You have no idea.”

“So show me,” he murmurs.

Something flashes in Rey’s eyes. That determination that he loves so much. She kisses him again, more fiercely this time; they’re both a little breathless when she pulls away. “Come here.” Her hand finds his, and she leads him back inside the apartment. He follows. In every world, he would follow.

She leads him to the bedroom, and Ben’s heart is thundering so hard in his chest he’s surprised she can’t hear it. There’s a wicked smile playing across her pretty mouth when she says, “Let’s see if you fit after all.”

And that’s all he needs. Ben surges forward, taking her face in his hands and kissing her for all he’s worth. Rey steps back until her calves bump up against the bed they built together, and Ben eases them down onto the mattress, shifting further up so Rey can rest her head on the pillow. She curves against him like she wants to feel every inch of him. He knows the feeling.

Lifting his head, Ben looks down at her. She’s absolutely gorgeous beneath him, her eyes bright and cheeks flushed, her hair on the pillow where his hand cradles her face. He strokes his thumb across her cheek and stretches one of his legs out straight until his toes hang over the end of the bed. “Huh.” He grins at her. “Guess it’s a good thing you cut down that footboard.”

“Oh thank god.” Grinning up at him in return, Rey grabs the front of his shirt and pulls him back down to kiss him again.

Ben loses himself in the moment, in her, in the feel of her hands and her mouth and her stomach warm against his. He tilts his head to kiss across her cheek and down the side of her neck; she twists her hands in his hair in response. And when he feels her start to roll her hips where his thigh is between hers, he buries his face against her shoulder and takes a shuddering breath and murmurs, “Tell me what you want, Rey.”

She presses her lips to his temple and hums softly. “Pretty much everything. But—maybe we can take it slow?”

He kisses her shoulder. “Anything you want. However you want.”

When she bites her lip, he can feel it against his skin. He also feels when she rolls her hips again. “Is this okay?” she whispers.

Ben lifts his head, reaching up to hold her chin in his hand. He meets her gaze, sees the dreamy haze falling over her eyes. “Rey. _ Anything you want.” _

She grins, pulls him back down, kisses him, and keeps rocking against his thigh.

Everything about her is beautiful. The way she winds her arms around his neck. The way she shivers under his hands when he runs them up and down her sides. The way she cants her hips up against him, whimpering and breathing harder and chasing something he desperately wants to give her. The way she tastes, smells, sounds, feels—everything about her is a goddamned dream. When her fingernails dig into his shoulders through his t-shirt and her breath shakes across his cheek, he turns his head and presses a soft kiss to her temple. “It’s all right, Rey,” he murmurs. “You can let go.”

And she does. She falls apart beneath him, clinging to him like her lifeline, and Ben holds her together through it. Rey trembles and kisses him hard, whining against his mouth, and he drinks down her sounds, swallows her pleasure. And when she goes limp and easy, he rolls to the side, gathering her up in his arms, and kisses her forehead.

Her fingers trace patterns against his chest. “Mm.”

“Hm.” Ben lifts a hand to stroke her hair. She usually ties it up when they build, but she wore it down tonight. He has a feeling it’s for him.

“You’re so warm,” she says, nuzzling her face against his shoulder. “And big.”

“Good big or bad big?”

She laughs. “Yes, Ben, I just came on your thigh because you’re ‘bad big.’”

“Can’t blame a guy for checking.” But he smiles when he says it. God, she makes him smile so much.

Rey tips her head up, and he looks down at her. She looks so sweet and comfortable and happy. So different from the pissed-off glare she gave him the day they met. “I’m glad this happened,” she says.

“Me too.”

“Can it—can it keep happening?” She presses a quick, cute kiss to his lips. “Even though there’s nothing left to build?”

“Rey, I’d love nothing more than being in this bed with you as often as you want me. Or on your balcony with you. Or anywhere with you.” He brushes her hair back from her forehead, watching her eyelids flutter at his touch. “And I don’t think it’s true. That we have nothing left to build.” He kisses her forehead, and then he watches her smile at him, and he can’t remember his heart ever feeling this full, this easy, and this right. “I think we’ve only just started building the best thing of all.”


End file.
